Stopping Amplified DNS DDoS Attacks through Distributed Query Rate Sharing

An Amplified DNS DDoS (ADD) attack involves tens of thousands of DNS resolvers that send huge volumes of amplified DNS responses to a single victim host, quickly flooding the victim's network bandwidth. Because ADD attacks are distributed, it is difficult for individual DNS resolvers to detect them based on local DNS query rates alone. Even if a victim detects an ADD attack, it cannot stop the attacker from flooding its network bandwidth. To address this problem, we present a novel mitigation system called"Distributed Rate Sharing based Amplified DNS-DDoS Attack Mitigation" (DRS-ADAM). DRS-ADAM facilitates DNS query rate sharing between DNS resolvers that are involved in an attack to detect and completely stop an ADD attack. Each DNS resolver quickly builds the global DNS query rate for potential victims by accumulating the shared rate values, and uses that global rate to make mitigation decisions locally. DRS-ADAM can be easily deployed through a small software update on resolvers and victim hosts, and does not require any additional server component. Our simulation results show that DRS-ADAM can contain the peak attack rates close to a victim's acceptable threshold values (which are far smaller than their sustainable bandwidth) at all times, regardless of the number of resolvers involved in ADD attacks. ADD attacks can be fully mitigated within a few seconds.